This was my first Sally Rooney novel.

Although ostensibly about grief, I found the more interesting themes to be about age (differences), masculinity, family, and what people owe to each other.

I’m recording these thoughts a day after having read it, I finished it in the morning and I did think about it all the rest of that day. But here on the second day, I’m kind of at a loss about to say about it… if that is any indication of how it was. I was quite ambivalent the whole way through reading it and remain ambivalent about it, but after having finished it I ended up liking it more than I expected, the too-saccharine end (for my taste) notwithstanding.

I admired the form that she created with it, switching between perspectives and having quite a different writing style between the perspectives, which she used effectively to portray the personalities and thoughts of the main characters.

Maybe I’m just a bit of a rube, but I did find her style of prose hard to read at times and not admirable in an aesthetic sense, especially for Peter‘s sections. I understand what she was going for, I just didn’t really like it. I also don’t like to listen to the music of Stockhausen. It didn’t take me long to begin to be extremely peeved with her descriptions of people conversing. I did like how she writes conversations in a very physical way, but can’t one do that in a wider way than: they’re hot, they’re cold, they’re simultaneously hot and cold ? If you played a drinking game where you took a shot every time a character on some part of their body felt hot or cold during a conversation, you’d be dead within one chapter.

The creation of the characters was very well done, most with a very believable point of view and personality that both play into stereotypes of types of people that I know, and yet still feel like real people and not reductions. She has a way to make the reader be compassionate to flaws in characters, for example with Peter who I found simultaneously contemptible and relatable, and also to characters being an antagonist to other characters’ lives, yet portraying them in a way that isn’t necessarily too simple or reductive, for example with the mother of the brothers. I didn’t mind and actually quite liked that we end up knowing next to nothing about the dead father. I was also impressed with the development of characters depending on whom they were interacting with; I could really sense the burgeoning maturity of Ivan when he’s alone or with Margaret and then see the regression back to a child-state when dealing with Peter.

But I felt it could’ve been tighter: I’m wondering why she wrote the third perspective of Margaret at all, although I could maybe understand because I felt like those sections lived in a way that the other sections in the brothers’ perspectives sometimes didn’t.

It’s a novel worth reading, but if the style of prose is any indication of what her other books or possible future books are like, I won’t necessarily be jumping at the opportunity to read them.

lyreplucker

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